History happens, mostly in many unnoticed moments and pieces, and Cincinnati is about to lose an important fragment.

Matched only by archives in Israel, the Hebrew Union College’s Cincinnati collection and library will be the latest casualty in the worldwide financial crisis.

A massive collection of history …matched only by resources in Israel – hold a physical connection to Jewish history…The Jacob Rader Marcus Center houses the archives, which boast more than 15 million documents on Jewish life. The nearby library holds hundreds of thousands of volumes. That collection includes everything from rare books and ancient scrolls to Bibles, cookbooks and Jewish songs. “There’s no other place like it in the world,” said Brian Jaffee, director of the Jewish Community Relations Council in Cincinnati.
–By Amber Ellis, Cincinnati Enquirer

The College faces having to close its Cincinnati and Los Angeles campuses,  leaving only its Jerusalem and New York campuses, unless people rally to help with its fiscal problems.

A quick side story here:  I first heard of the College from a good friend and mentor.  He was a history buff -  of flags, boundaries, churches and leaders, that in the end was his reason for an agnosticism towards ideologies and religions.

My friend would chuckle wryly about  being a Leipziger kind bullied in a predominantly Catholic school; of his early connoisseurship on just which leather and candles are edible, a ten-year old in the Hitler youth corps being marched in the countryside, and sleeping in cold stables; and yet still later by Russian liberators who singled him out because his capitalist stepfather had owned a bicycle manufacturing company.   My “arian” friend, by the way had to be the most unprejudiced person in actual practice – and made me see my own biases more honestly.

All cultures, all people-  don’t we all have prejudices? Profiling is often unconscious and instinctual; it’s our limbic survival mechanism for the jungles and urban back alleys,  and we must first recognize that. Think of the convolutions of political correct-speak;  isn’t it,  ultimately, naive and treacherous?

Understanding history is learning a greater empathy,  but also better self-honesty about innate human nature that would exploit, or simply forget.  ( By the way – so who out there knows what and when Galicia even was?  Exactly. )

Interior

The loss of the Hebrew Union College’s  Cincinnati campus would be a discontinuity, of political and cultural significance.   Here is where Rebbeh Isaac M Wise started the Reform Judaism movement in 1875 .  The Plum Street Temple, even just as an aesthetic artifact, is easily one of the most beautiful in the country.

Mine is not just abstract sentiment. I learned a lot from the College’s classes and dialogic seminars, which  offer to the entire community insights into Jewish religion and culture with comparative context provided by Christian priests/ministers and Islamic imams – some of whom are on its faculty -  which is perhaps the kind of understanding that real freedom and peace can come from.

Postscript: Some Must-Reads

You’ll  want to check out a Must-Have list of Exploration titles that are as fascinating as they are enlightening.     By the way – I’ve included Pulitzer-author G. Brooks’ recent People of the Book ,  a serendipitous find  you’ll like for its rich tapestry of realizations.  Great fun read, too.

I once walked for hours through old Jerusalem, and couldn’t help thinking of H. Raucher’s words, “Life is made of small comings and goings, and for everything we take with us, there is something we leave behind“.   The same words echoed in Cairo, as I listened to cyclic arabesques while sitting on the floor of the 12th century  Al-Hussein.

Indeed, nothing happens that ultimately is not part of our own history.

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This entry was posted Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 11:52 am and is filed under Brain Aspects of Decision Making. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.